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It's true that bank accounts are relatively secure from seizure when crossing borders, but literally everybody I know here in Argentina who's my age or older lost three quarters of the savings in their bank accounts 23 years ago, because the government took it by converting dollars to pesos at the 1:1 pegged exchange rate and then dropping the peg. In a cryptocurrency wallet (a real one, not an exchange like Mt.Gox, Coinbase, or Binance) they wouldn't have lost anything. Another case is when a foreign government puts you on a sanctions list and freezes your assets in the banks under their jurisdiction. This has happened to a lot of Russians and Russian companies in the last few years. (It also happened to the foreign reserves of the Russian central bank, but Bitcoin is not liquid enough to be a significant international reserve asset.) Another case is when the government suspects you of some kind of wrongdoing but can't physically find you, or can find you but for whatever reason isn't willing to torture you. For example, two and a half years ago, some truckers in Canada staged a protest for misguided reasons, and the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau froze not only the truckers' bank accounts, and the organizers' bank accounts, but even bank accounts suspected to belong to people who were suspected of donating to the protest: https://www.cato.org/blog/emergencies-act-after-two-years https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-... https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/bureaucrats-who-froze... > In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday. (...) Two weeks ago, some Freedom Convoy organizers testified their spouses were cut off from their money and couldn’t make vehicle payments or purchase groceries and medication because joint bank accounts were frozen. Earlier this year, a court found that the government's actions at the time were illegal. https://freespeechunion.org/trudeau-government-not-justified... explains: > In pursuing this novel form of politically motivated financial censorship, Prime Minister Trudeau was following in the footsteps of Russian President Vladmir Putin, who in 2019 ordered his government to freeze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny. And of course it's well known that, when Wikileaks was targeted by the US government for their journalism, Visa and Mastercard cut off their donations despite apparently having no legal requirement to do so, while Bitcoin donations were able to continue. This was crucial in enabling Wikileaks to support Snowden's escape from the US when he revealed the extent of the US's illegal spying on its own citizens. |